By “all games look the same” I’m being hyperbolic. I mean nearly all AAA games and the majority of AA games (and not an insignificant number of indies even).
Whenever I see takes like these I can’t help but think that people who like to talk about games don’t play enough games, or just think of a handful of high profile releases as all of gaming.
Lol. No. Again, I was being hyperbolic and talking mostly about the AAA and AA space. I personally almost exclusively play indies who know what they’re trying to make and use a style appropriate to it. I play probably too many games. I also occasionally make games myself, I was the officer in a game development club in college, and I have friends in the industry. I’m not just some person who doesn’t understand video games.
Well, then don’t be hyperbolic, let’s see where that takes us.
That video is still nonsensical, just eloquently nonsensical. Makes me think he hasn’t been to Bilbao, for one thing, but talking about games, not architecture, he caveats the crap out of a tautology just to end up in a tautology: AAA games look like this because a AAA game is a game that looks like this, whatever “like this” means.
For one thing, man, do I wish Detroit had never existed. I never played that game, but it’s amazing that for a while there we had this little cottage industry of doomsters that used Detroit to show how bad anything ranging from David Cage’s games to Sony to graphics, apparently turn out to be. To such a degree that I have very rarely seen a defense of Detroit, I’ve never played Detroit, the game seems to not have done that well and Cage has never published another game. It’s a consensus entirely predicated on opposing a fanbase of defenders that seemingly never existed.
All the while this guy argues that AAA games have a look (then caveats that some don’t) while showing clips from, if you’re keeping track, a game about robot dinosaurs set in a lush jungle full of red plants (which is shocking imagery pulling inspiration from super nerdy, niche illustration work), a bleak but beautiful zombie apocalypse made out of grungy rural clothing, a superhero game and a gorgeousely unique take on norse mythology. None of those games look alike in any way that makes sense. Not more than Spider-Man 2, Transformers, A Quiet Place and The Northman look alike. Photographing people as a technique is not an aesthetic, and it certainly isn’t an aesthetic limitation. That’s like saying that only animation is creative while photography isn’t. It’s such a disservice to creativity.
But even from a 2020 video, things have moved in the direction he wants, if only because the games industry is unraveling, I suppose. If you peek at game awards in the interim, the games that got most attention in those five years include The Last of Us II, but also Hades, Elden Ring, Balatro, Astro Bot, Animal Crossing, It Takes Two, Baldur’s Gate III, Animal Crossing, Alan Wake 2 and Tears of the Kingdom. In the recent batch of first party events there was a genuine splash of discourse about which rendition of fake stop motion looked better between the Louisiana fantasy Wizard of Oz reimagining and the creepy claymation… horror FPS thing? What are we talking about again?
Let me drop the pretense for a moment and make a case for what I think we’re talking about: this narrative is part of the problem, if there is a problem. These contrarian takes are being tautological for the sake of affecting elevated taste and elitist insight others lack. The truth is games look all sorts of ways and explore wildly different art styles, scopes and concepts. But the discourse is antagonistic and narrow. People latch on to games not to praise them and explore them but to complain and wear them down, and so gaming gets reduced to whatever we don’t like, with whatever we do like being passed as a secret hidden gem or an outlier. It’s why there’s more discourse about Concord, which is a game that looked bad, wasn’t great and nobody played, than about Marvel Rivals, which is a game that is just as expensive but looks bright and colorful and cartoony and is extremely popular. In the games industry people sometimes refer to that look as a “mainstream look”, because so many popular games look like that. It’s the look of Fortnite and The Sims and World of Warcraft and Team Fortress, and it’s gradually going more anime as mainstream games pivot to Asia, becoming the look of Genshin Impact, and Zenless Zone Zero and Marvel Rivals.
This is a talking point people like to drop to feel fancy and elevated that implies that we’re somehow still living in an industry circa 2008 when home console single player action adventure games dominated the sales charts and smaller games were a dying breed barely kept alive by a group of plucky indies. For better and worse, we haven’t lived in that world for a while. If anything, I miss the mid 2000s AAA approach to gaming. Nobody is doing it outside of Sony and a couple weirdos like Sam Lake, and it was a comforting, creative, interesting approach that has unfortunately ran out of runway while presumptuous commentators keep beating a dead horse because either they didn’t get the memo or because it’s perhaps too depressing to look at the real state of the industry.
Did I drop the Socratic pretense too hard? Got too real? We can go back to pretending we don’t know what we’re talking about if that makes everybody feel better.
By “all games look the same” I’m being hyperbolic. I mean nearly all AAA games and the majority of AA games (and not an insignificant number of indies even).
Watch this video. Maybe it’ll help you understand what I’m saying.
Lol. No. Again, I was being hyperbolic and talking mostly about the AAA and AA space. I personally almost exclusively play indies who know what they’re trying to make and use a style appropriate to it. I play probably too many games. I also occasionally make games myself, I was the officer in a game development club in college, and I have friends in the industry. I’m not just some person who doesn’t understand video games.
Well, then don’t be hyperbolic, let’s see where that takes us.
That video is still nonsensical, just eloquently nonsensical. Makes me think he hasn’t been to Bilbao, for one thing, but talking about games, not architecture, he caveats the crap out of a tautology just to end up in a tautology: AAA games look like this because a AAA game is a game that looks like this, whatever “like this” means.
For one thing, man, do I wish Detroit had never existed. I never played that game, but it’s amazing that for a while there we had this little cottage industry of doomsters that used Detroit to show how bad anything ranging from David Cage’s games to Sony to graphics, apparently turn out to be. To such a degree that I have very rarely seen a defense of Detroit, I’ve never played Detroit, the game seems to not have done that well and Cage has never published another game. It’s a consensus entirely predicated on opposing a fanbase of defenders that seemingly never existed.
All the while this guy argues that AAA games have a look (then caveats that some don’t) while showing clips from, if you’re keeping track, a game about robot dinosaurs set in a lush jungle full of red plants (which is shocking imagery pulling inspiration from super nerdy, niche illustration work), a bleak but beautiful zombie apocalypse made out of grungy rural clothing, a superhero game and a gorgeousely unique take on norse mythology. None of those games look alike in any way that makes sense. Not more than Spider-Man 2, Transformers, A Quiet Place and The Northman look alike. Photographing people as a technique is not an aesthetic, and it certainly isn’t an aesthetic limitation. That’s like saying that only animation is creative while photography isn’t. It’s such a disservice to creativity.
But even from a 2020 video, things have moved in the direction he wants, if only because the games industry is unraveling, I suppose. If you peek at game awards in the interim, the games that got most attention in those five years include The Last of Us II, but also Hades, Elden Ring, Balatro, Astro Bot, Animal Crossing, It Takes Two, Baldur’s Gate III, Animal Crossing, Alan Wake 2 and Tears of the Kingdom. In the recent batch of first party events there was a genuine splash of discourse about which rendition of fake stop motion looked better between the Louisiana fantasy Wizard of Oz reimagining and the creepy claymation… horror FPS thing? What are we talking about again?
Let me drop the pretense for a moment and make a case for what I think we’re talking about: this narrative is part of the problem, if there is a problem. These contrarian takes are being tautological for the sake of affecting elevated taste and elitist insight others lack. The truth is games look all sorts of ways and explore wildly different art styles, scopes and concepts. But the discourse is antagonistic and narrow. People latch on to games not to praise them and explore them but to complain and wear them down, and so gaming gets reduced to whatever we don’t like, with whatever we do like being passed as a secret hidden gem or an outlier. It’s why there’s more discourse about Concord, which is a game that looked bad, wasn’t great and nobody played, than about Marvel Rivals, which is a game that is just as expensive but looks bright and colorful and cartoony and is extremely popular. In the games industry people sometimes refer to that look as a “mainstream look”, because so many popular games look like that. It’s the look of Fortnite and The Sims and World of Warcraft and Team Fortress, and it’s gradually going more anime as mainstream games pivot to Asia, becoming the look of Genshin Impact, and Zenless Zone Zero and Marvel Rivals.
This is a talking point people like to drop to feel fancy and elevated that implies that we’re somehow still living in an industry circa 2008 when home console single player action adventure games dominated the sales charts and smaller games were a dying breed barely kept alive by a group of plucky indies. For better and worse, we haven’t lived in that world for a while. If anything, I miss the mid 2000s AAA approach to gaming. Nobody is doing it outside of Sony and a couple weirdos like Sam Lake, and it was a comforting, creative, interesting approach that has unfortunately ran out of runway while presumptuous commentators keep beating a dead horse because either they didn’t get the memo or because it’s perhaps too depressing to look at the real state of the industry.
Did I drop the Socratic pretense too hard? Got too real? We can go back to pretending we don’t know what we’re talking about if that makes everybody feel better.